Latest news with #MeanStreets
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Rocker Pays ‘Awesome' Tribute to His Late Legendary Father by Playing His Iconic Guitar
Wolfgang Van Halen continues to pay tribute to guitar legend Eddie Van Halen by occasionally playing his father's guitar. On Monday, May 5, Wolfgang shared a video on X, formerly Twitter, of him playing his father's famed guitar known as Frankenstein, because the elder Van Halen customized the instrument by adding parts from various guitars. 🎬 SIGN UP for Parade's Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox 🎬 In the 20-second clip, Wolfgang is seen playing along to a recorded track as he sits cross-legged. Fans will recognize the red guitar with the customized white and black stripes that became an Eddie Van Halen trademark. 'Fun fact, I recorded the main tapping of the song, and the slap part with the Frankenstein! Makes me feel closer to Pop that such an important part of his history can live with mine every time I record ❤️,' Wolfgang, who is the son of Valerie Bertinelli, captioned the clip. Fans were quick to comment on the clip. 'What an awesome nod to "Mean Streets" but in his own way. I wonder why no other guitarists have incorporated this technique. Maybe it was too hard, or maybe it sounded too much like EVH. Either way, this is awesome,' wrote one. Wolf replied to that comment by writing, 'Hah it's actually not, it's just a slap bass part on a guitar, but thank you!' 'So rad! How awesome to see that not only you are getting to make that connection, but we as fans get to continue to make a connection to EVH through you. The new song is just awesome! Great job Wolfie!' wrote another fan.
The National
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
Has Robert De Niro found his most important role: taking on Trump?
With a soft kiss and a tender hug for Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro accepted his lifetime achievement Palme D'Or award earlier this week. What does an authentic patriarch (or for that matter, matriarch) do? Identify the threat to the tribe, gather forces for self-defence and self-belief. Small and bowed, craggy and thinning-greying, De Niro stepped up. Without missing a beat, the actor launched into his Trump attacks. This 'philistine president' cuts arts budgets; tries to put a 'tariff on creativity'; attacks creatives for their commitments to 'diversity' and 'inclusion'; sees artists as a threat 'to autocrats and fascists' (like him). Bob's quiet Brooklyn tones ended with a flourish to the assembled cinecrats, wreathed with his anxiety about democracy's survival in his country: 'Liberté, égalité, fraternité!' De Niro is rarely this polite in his objections to the Caligularity. His signature routine is to stroll up to a live mic and state: 'Fuck Trump … Fuck him.' It comes with a rich shower of other epithets. 'The jerk-off-in-chief'. 'The baby-in-chief'. 'A total loser … a wannabe gangster'. 'A punk, a dog, a pig, a con, a bullshit artist, a mutt who doesn't know what he's talking about, a bozo…' And from that famous black-and-white 2016 presidential campaign video, this: 'Trump says he wants to punch people in the face … Well … I'd like to punch him in the face.' Post-assassination attempt, De Niro has dialled this stuff down. On the Cannes stage, he stated: 'Unlike a film, we can't just all sit back and watch [the Trump regime]. We have to act, and we have to act now – without violence, but with great passion and determination.' Yet the question is begged: how effective, wherever he sets the dial, is De Niro's macho resistance against the broligarch-in-chief? Does this kind of 'hard talk' just reinforce the 'manosphere' that has been driving Trump's rise to power? There's an obvious (though crass) swipe to be made against De Niro. A career built on entertaining audiences with cold-hearted, pathological, calculating, murderous males is hardly a solid perch from which to, as it were, fire broadsides at Trump. It's certainly crass, if you dwell with the artistry of De Niro's work. He's covered the waterfront of post-Second World War masculinity, in ways that both subvert and reinforce stereotypes. Take Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter and Raging Bull (1973-80). These are existential man-children, alienated and repressed, unable to reconcile tenderness with violence. It's chastening to think that the corroded manhood we worry about these days was fully channelled by wartime-framed characters like Travis Bickle, Jake La Motta and Mike Vronsky. De Niro (and Martin Scorsese) completed their prophecy by doing The King Of Comedy in 1982. This captures very early the psychological distortions that celebrity-mania brings to broken, exhausted citizens. De Niro's 90s movies – like Goodfellas, Cape Fear, Casino, and Heat – again are, in retrospect, prophetic about our times. Here's your full range of criminal patriarchs – not railing against the system, but seeking mastery of their own version of it. And suffering an internal collapse, as they cut their deals, follow their codes of honour, show affection as the feint before a kill. You might imagine explicit masculinists – no doubt Trump among them – lauding these characters as men in action, getting things executed (at every level). But again, attend to De Niro's performance. He shows the deadened emotional abyss behind the organisational front. In his 2000s and 2010s films, like Meet The Parents, Silver Linings Playbook, The Good Shepherd and The Intern, De Niro is embodying those confused elder men, clinging to structures of traditional respect, that comprise much of Trump's electoral demographic. READ MORE: Israeli strikes kill at least 93 in Gaza as Trump wraps up Middle East visit They're suspicious and surveillant, trying to reinject meaning and emotion where it's not wanted. But De Niro plays this with pathos and irony. It's counter to some MAGA-style affirmation of the values of the past. De Niro's late roles – the strongest being The Irishman (2019) and Killers Of The Flower Moon (2023) – are haunted by the crimes and misdemeanours of being powerful, untrammelled men. Males aren't unrelentingly dominant here – they're busy reckoning with their past, what they've done and what they were too cowardly to stop. De Niro's current political fury against Trump often focuses on his sheer heedlessness, regarding the harsh effects of the policies he imposes through executive order. Indeed, it's as if De Niro's brutal and relentless denunciations of Trump are rooted in his mourning of all the varieties of broken and damaged men he has played in his career. Who better than De Niro to see what a poor construction Trump makes of his masculinity? A yearning for restoration – loud, resentful, imperial – which is actually a pathetic fantasy. One which De Niro's long list of characters refute. They know (at least eventually) that aggression has costs, honour is a trap and total control is a complete farce. So, a sit-down with the young men in your life around some key movies in the De Niro canon might well be an effective antidote to 'manosphere' blues. But that implies, in the first place, that these souls could physically disengage from the algorithm-driven devices that catch them in their snares. Compared to the shadowy, soulful monsters of De Niro's masculine characters, 'the tech-bro' is a telling update. These aren't mobsters or vigilantes but biohackers, aiming to maximise their productivity. They're self-branding males who build their sense of value from their optimisations, not their obligations. READ MORE: Secret Israeli party at British Museum attended by Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch Their aim isn't really control of the streets – it's control of the self, or the simulation of it. And this by means of computer code (as crypto), physical fitness, social status, charisma. Yet the cost, across the eras, is the same: emotional suppression, distrust of intimacy and a denial of relational vulnerability. What De Niro's archive of masculinity can point out is that the manosphere sets up young men to fail, as the criteria for success is increasingly unreal. Look at the pathetic or bloodied ends of the leads in Raging Bull and Heat: super-capable and agentic men, but utterly alone at the end of their days. In the closing sequences of The Irishman, De Niro's character Frank Sheeran sits in a care home, forgotten and abandoned. Sheeran has shown terrifying levels of impersonality in his killing career over the preceding three hours. Now, so confused he doesn't know whether it's Christmas or not, Frank asks the nurse if his door could be left open. This is a last nod to his security days –even his final descent still not free of the old paranoias. A diet of De Niro is certainly not enough for confused and direction-blurred young men to clarify and deepen themselves. We need more positive narratives and worlds made for them – the absence of which opens up the channels in which maleficent political operators can foment grievance. As the gender researcher Alice Lassman wrote in Newsweek this March, 'reclaiming what makes masculinity so endearing – its honesty, integrity and discipline – has never been more essential to the survival of our democracy … Make no mistake: the emerging definition of manhood consolidates Trump's power, encouraging conformity to an ideal that is out of reach.' Artistically, De Niro has tested to destruction the masks of manhood that our damaged societies of the 20th and 21st centuries asked us to wear. At a moment of dangerous crisis for male power, he's doing what he can – which is not perfect – to point out our old pathologies. It may be his most important role to date.
Indian Express
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Robert De Niro, the Wise Guy at Cannes
By the time Robert De Niro arrived at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976, with Martin Scorsese's dark, unsettling Taxi Driver — which won the top prize that year — and Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900, a five-hour-long epic historical about Italy in the first half of the 20th century, he had behind him the weight of two roles of the kind that would, for a lesser actor, have been a career peak. To both Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973) and Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather: Part II (1974), he brought a magnetic, chameleon-like quality that marked him as one of the most exciting talents of the age. Over the next half-century, he became recognised as one of the undeniable greats. At Cannes this year, 49 years after he first came to the Croisette, De Niro was honoured with an honorary Palme d'Or for Lifetime Achievement. Consider the filmography that followed Taxi Driver, in which he gave one of the most riveting performances of his career as the lonely, deeply paranoid Travis Bickle (the 'you talkin' to me?' scene might be the most popular audition choice for aspiring actors everywhere). From Jake LaMotte, the toxic, self-destructive boxer of Raging Bull (1980) to Rupert Pupkin, the delusional wannabe comedian of The King of Comedy (1982), from the cold, violent mobster, Jimmy the Gent, in Goodfellas (1990) to the sly, charming and utterly poisonous William King Hale in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), De Niro has delivered performances that balance a deeply interiorised understanding of character with a captivating screen presence. Even when it seemed like he was simply playing a variation of the 'wise guy' or gangster, he has managed to make each character unique. Many of these are also the result of association with like-minded artists, including Scorsese, with whom he has made 10 films, filmmaker Brian De Palma and actor Joe Pesci. The honouring of De Niro is thus also a celebration of cinema as the most collaborative of art forms.
Telegraph
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Beyond Paradise, series 3, episode 1, review: as relaxing as a mini-break in Devon and Cornwall
Call me old-fashioned, but sometimes I like to stick to the television schedules. Some programmes are just suited to their time slot. Beyond Paradise (BBC One) is perfect Friday night viewing. You've had a long week, you feel a bit frazzled, and you just want to wind down with some escapist TV that feels as relaxing as a mini-break in Devon and Cornwall (minus the hours spent on the M5). The Death in Paradise spin-off has returned for a third series with a gem of an episode. All the required elements are here: Kris Marshall being endearingly klutzy but impressively clever, a guest star – Hugh Dennis in this case – and a perfect mystery of the week. It begins with Dennis reporting that his partner has just driven off into the night, drunk, after an argument. We see the car crash through a gate and end up in the river. The Tamar marks the border between Devon and Cornwall, which means that two police forces are vying to investigate. DI Humphrey Goodman (Marshall) and his sidekick have to deal with a pair of supercilious rival detectives, DI Tremayne and DS Foster, who dismiss the case out of hand. 'Call me old-fashioned,' says Tremayne (the always funny Steve Oram), 'but when I see a car spun off the road by a drunk driver parked in a river, I tend to think 'accident'. Unless you're suggesting he wanted to park there?' Toxicology reports show that the victim was definitely over the limit, there is CCTV of him driving the car at speed, and the cause of death was drowning. But Goodman knows something is amiss when he spots that the deceased is wearing odd socks. The solution to the mystery was both ingenious and ridiculous in the best possible way. Tremayne and Foster deliver most of the comedy, practising their Duolingo Spanish (badly) and engaging in an amusing face-off over scones – jam or cream first? Dylan Llewellyn provides support as the sweet-natured PC Kelby. On the domestic front, Humphrey's suave love rival, Archie, is back on the scene, but it's very good-natured. It is all so enjoyably light that Death In Paradise, which follows in a BBC One double bill, seems like Mean Streets by comparison. Beyond Paradise was the biggest new drama launch of 2023 and the second series was one of the BBC's top-rated shows. It's not hard to see why. It's fun, comforting and fills that Doc Martin-shaped hole in your life.
Telegraph
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Alto Knights: Double De Niro? It's a singularly bad gimmick
Robert De Niro has forged some legendary screen partnerships in his day. With Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets. With Joe Pesci, seven times. With Al Pacino in Heat and The Irishman. But De Niro pitted against De Niro in The Alto Knights? Forget about it – an instruction that's sadly all too easy to obey. The gimmick of this film, a ho-hum Mafia thriller that won't be entering the pantheon, is that De Niro plays both main characters, real-life childhood friends Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, who grew up to be feared mob bosses in 1950s New York. The rivalry between these rascals exploded with a failed hit attempt on Costello in 1957, which pushed him into retirement, while Genovese, a few years younger, did everything in his power to become the so-called 'capo di tutti capi' (boss of bosses). The film can't help but remind you of the first face-off between De Niro and Pacino, a quote-unquote iconic moment, in Heat (majestically shot by this film's cinematographer, the incomparable Dante Spinotti). Alas, Bobby-squared here lacks anything like the impact. When he sits down facing himself for a pow-wow in an empty café, we're only alert to the technique. The visual effects job would be distracting whether it's fine (which it is), or bad. Much the same could be said of the prosthetics and styling that distinguish the characters. As Frank, who ages up further to narrate this tale, De Niro is a ringer for his Irishman character and lacks compelling fish to fry. Before and after the head shot that nearly kills him, he's a mafioso on the back foot, proceeding with cautious decency. How he's feared or even respected as a gangster is hard to understand. He's simply not interesting. As Vito, we get a bit more value from the 81-year-old star. His voice is pitched higher, entering a needling Pesci-esque zone. He relentlessly bullies his henchman Vincent (Cosmo Jarvis, burying his James Caan looks in an added roll of neck fat) for failing to take another pop at Frank when he had the chance. Vito is despicable, entirely self-interested, and quite persuasive. The Alto Knights certainly has the off-screen pedigree you'd hope for. Nicholas Pileggi (Goodfellas, Casino) wrote the script, named after an infamous Manhattan social club. But the circuitous shaping feels off, a problem Barry Levinson's direction is too flaccid to fix. Nothing more exciting occurs than the botched hit, which is staged at the very start, meaning that the alleged climax – a panicked countryside Mob convention later that year – is laden with more strain that it can stand. The women in it are the ones doing the best work. Debra Messing, as Frank's wife Bobbie, has figured out how to long for respectability, be bright and charming, and anticipate doom all at once. Meanwhile, as a sharp-tongued club hostess who became Vito's second wife and bitterly fought him in divorce court, Kathrine Narducci is such an asset it's especially bizarre that the film just ghosts her from that point forth. We know all too well that there's only one De Niro – and with no other actor showing up for the prize fight, we need all the genuine conflict we can get.
